Coinbase fired an engineer after they refused to use AI coding tools

AI coding tools are all the rage in fintech. Last summer, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said his engineers were writing half their code with AI. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has just admitted the same, having gone to slightly more extreme lengths to tout that fact.

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Speaking on a podcast by Norges Bank, Armstrong said, "on our software engineering team, more than 50% of the code is being written by AI." Armstrong said that about a year ago, he pushed for Coinbase's engineers to start using tools like Cursor and Claude; he said people were "a little hesitant... now almost all the engineers are using it every day."

This didn't come about without some nudging. When around 70% of Coinbase engineers had experimented with AI, Armstrong said he got "impatient" and sent a note out to staff saying that, if they hadn't signed up to try an AI tool by the end of the week, they'd be put in a meeting on Saturday with Armstrong so they could tell him why they hadn't.

Armstrong said one employee got fired because of this; they'd refused to use AI tools and didn't show up to the meeting. He said that the engineer didn't have a "good reason" like vacation or parental leave, so they were told they were "not a good fit for the company," and let go. Armstrong said the ordeal created a "very clear tone from the top that we need to stay on top of these things to stay relevant as a company."

It's hard not to place some blame on the developer in that instance, having ghosted their CEO, but it's not the first time Coinbase has taken an unconventional approach to its engineering culture. At the start of last year, the firm initiated a 'new norm' in which projects could have no more than one bug per developer working on it. 

Armstrong also noted that, thanks to AI coding, Coinbase has "started to see some really impressive potential cost savings." Given that the firm made a $667m loss last year, it will be keen to realize as many cost savings as it can in 2026.

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